Last night, R and I were poking around the Saturday Night Live archives on NBC.com and came across this little gem from 2000.
It’s startling how prophetic it was.
It’s still funny, but then it kind of isn’t.
Three more weeks.
by James Brush
Coyote Mercury Posts
There are as many skeletons as bird feeders out now, and you can feel the changes. I notice for the first time the days shortening, shadows at six o’clock filling the house and from a more southern angle. The world is ticking back to fall and the birds know it.
Mainly due to allergies, I haven’t been out birding like I like to, but I’ve noticed some interesting things through the windows of the house and the car.
The House Sparrows are returning to the front flower bed. Last winter a small flock of 20 or so of these little birds took up residence in the thick bushes off the front porch. They dispersed in the spring, only a few pairs staying behind, but now that flocking season is here, they’re back. Every time I open the front door a burst of sparrows appears and hurries to the neighbor’s flowerbed.
The Cardinals and Blue Jays are still around. Last year, we went out of town in late July and when we came back they had gone, and I didn’t see them around again until March. This year when we left, we had the neighbor kids keep the feeders going and they’ve stuck around. I guess last year the feeders going empty right at the end of nesting season inspired them to move on.
The Chipping Sparrows aren’t back yet, but I don’t expect them for another month or so.
The Chickadees are back in force. They are occasional visitors to the feeders during the summer months, but they are much more common in the fall through spring.
The hummingbirds seem to have left, but I’ll keep the feeders up for a little while longer in the hope a Rufous Hummer will come by.
I’m suddenly seeing more Carolina Wrens than Bewick’s, though the Bewick’s are still here. I wonder if any are the ones I saw fledge back in June.
Around the neighborhood, I’ve noticed ducks starting to come back to the ponds while more hawks drift overhead.
Driving to work each morning, I look for the Scissor-tails. They’re still around, flocking up in preparation for their long journey to the Central American highlands. I thought they’d be gone by now, but each morning I see more and more sitting on the power lines, and I find I am grateful for each day that I get one more look at these favorite birds before they leave. I suspect that like many birds they’re waiting for the morning the light falls in just a certain way that will say to them, “fly.”
I’ve been at this blogging business for 3 years now so I mark the day with a post linking back to my first one, which originally was, and still is, on Blogger with my original blue look and everything.
Thursday’s post on Zen and the Art of Blogging is probably a better reflection of the whole blogging experience so I won’t delve back into that today.
Mainly, I want to think about obligations and hobbies. Or how this blog tried to become a blogligation. It was the Weekend (and later Friday) Hound Bloggings, the Monday Movie Roundups, the Friday Random Tens, the Old Photo Fridays, the write ups of every book I read from the time I started this blog until I made a conscious decision to stop back in March of this year.
Each day, I had a to-do list and the only remedy seemed to be a to-don’t list. And so the hobby, which had been fun, became more of a chore. I posted because I had to, not necessarily because I wanted to.
The lesson here at three seems to be that unless you’re doing this for money, do it for fun. For me, obligations are not fun. It’s something I try to remember but sometimes forget. It’s why I think carefully about setting goals involving things I love.
I know several people who try to read x number of books per year. I could never do that. I would begin to feel I had to do what I originally wanted to do, thereby crossing the line from having hobbies to hobbies having me.
Perhaps that’s why this blog became more and more about birds over the past year. Birds are a reminder of freedom, and while their lives are full of their own have-tos and necessities, there is nothing about the act of birding that makes me feel I have to do anything. Or be anything. I suspect I enjoy birding for many of the same reasons fishermen fish. I may not see a single bird, but I never consider it a waste of time.
Birding and writing have a similar effect on me as well. When I am through for the day with either activity, I am always surprised by the time, how much of it has gone by. It is like waking from a dream, and I feel refreshed and at peace.
Back to the top, and I can see that this site was a hobby that became an obligation, but by stepping away from it for a while, and only using it to express another hobby, the obligation seems gone and now, at three, I’m back to one.
This is awful.
Talk about never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups…
The celebration of ugliness, hate and stupidity that the Republican party has become under McCain and especially Palin really is breathtaking. I hope all we’re seeing are the last throes of a dying beast, but even if they are this is not good. John McCain, at least, should be better than this.
If Obama wins (please please please let that happen) these people will dog him with the line that he’s a terrorist, a socialist, unAmerican. Of course these are the people who still like Bush. The guy who’s bringing us closer to socialism than we’ve ever been, but still, that’s different, though I don’t see how.
Fortunately, a few Republicans still have a modicum of sanity left. David Brooks:
But over the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts. This expulsion has had many causes. But the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Michael Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads.
Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.
What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.
Republicans developed their own leadership style. If Democratic leaders prized deliberation and self-examination, then Republicans would govern from the gut.
How did we become a society that so easily and willingly throws out the very idea of deliberation in favor of acting solely on impulse in the manner of teenagers?
McCain and Palin are running on nothing more than fear, feeding its flames with their insistence that there’s just something not quite American about Obama. Something insidious about the man who will most likely be our next president.
If Obama is elected he will have to face this over-the-top hatred the entire time he is in office. Should John McCain somehow win in this way, how in hell does he expect to bring the country together or get a Democratic congress to work with him?
Country first, indeed.
I saw this guy climbing along the house a few months back and happened to have my camera. Unfortunately, I cropped off most of his tail. Need to pay more attention to framing instead of thinking, “!Whoo hoo! A lizard!” That’s the trick of shooting animals, though. Slow down. Relax. Get the right shot.
Their tails do grow back, but I’m not sure it will show up in the picture.
I’ve been reading Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. His quest to understand Quality and his thoughts about the joy he finds in keeping his machine running have gotten me thinking about all kinds of things I do: writing, teaching, teaching writing, photography, blogging, and blog maintenance.
Mostly blog maintenance. First, I want to think about keeping it running as a piece of software on a machine as opposed to writing the content that appears on the screen.
Pirsig writes eloquently about the process of maintaining a motorcycle:
The thing to do when working on a motorcycle, as in any other task, is to cultivate the peace of mind that does not separate one’s self from one’s surroundings.
[…]
Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all.
The difficulty lies in the various traps that Pirsig labels value traps, truth traps and muscle traps. Falling into these traps steers one away from Quality, the idea the book explores.
The more I read, the more I realized I actually understand most of what he writes about motorcycle maintenance, but not because I know anything about motorcycles – I don’t – still, I’ve been there and have intuitively come to similar conclusions. Doing the backend maintenance necessary to run a self-hosted blog or any website, I assume, is exactly like motorcycle maintenance.
A question I frequently ask myself, though, is why bother. There are so many blogging platforms out there where all I would have to do is write and put up my posts. Why go to the trouble to maintain the thing myself? Why deal with upgrades that don’t go as planned and potentially could screw up the database? Why mess with plugins that sometimes gum up the whole system? Why bother with themes that break?
I think the questions led me to the same issue Pirsig wrestles with. It has to do with Quality. With the relationship between the machine, the user and the process. Spending hours tinkering with the backend code and pieces of this blog are not really about the blog. It’s never even noticed by anyone reading it.
It’s about learning. It’s about growing.
Pirsig writes:
The real cycle you’re working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be “out there” and the person that appears to be “in here” are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.
It all has to do with “living right.”
There is beauty and joy… life… to be discovered in doing things fully and completely. The more I approach life’s tasks with a quiet peaceful mind, the more fully, I think, I live.
Now I need to think of maintenance in the broader sense as it applies to this blog. Like Pirsig’s motorcycle, the blog is a machine with an engine that makes it go (the WordPress software), and it is a vehicle that takes me places, in this case the writing, which transports me into my head as I do it.
(I must admit I wish it would transport me physically to the Montana Rockies like Pirsig’s bike, but all good things must have their limits, I suppose.)
Maintaining (in both senses of the word, now) my blog suddenly seemed more important because I came to see that it is through this process that I can stay in tune with these lessons about right living. It is because of the hours spent working on it, that I have been able to relate so easily to what Pirsig writes.
Further, he reminds me that:
If you’re a sloppy thinker the six days of the week you aren’t working on your machine, what trap avoidances, what gimmicks, can make you all of a sudden sharp on the seventh?
[…]
But if you’re a sloppy thinker six days a week and you really try to be sharp on the seventh, then maybe the next six days aren’t going to be as sloppy as the preceding six.
And so because maintaining a blog is two things – keeping it running and writing, I’m back.
For the backend aspect of maintenance, I upgraded to 2.6.2, which is why some things are a little off while I work through the kinks.
Because maintaining the blog also means writing, I am reminded that through writing here, I ensure that my thinking is at its sharpest and that I approach closer to true Quality whenever I write and especially when I am sitting down to focus on a manuscript.
I never really thought of this silly blog as a way of thinking about life, but as I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, it is because of this blog that I know and understand exactly what Pirsig is talking about in his book.
I haven’t been blogging political in months. Hell, I’ve barely been blogging at all for months, but now that we’re only a month out from the election, I can’t resist, not that I have been resisting, per se, but there are things to say.I voted for McCain in the 2000 primary and might very well have voted for him in the general had he been the nominee. We would have been better off.
I’ve been an Obama supporter all along this cycle, but now I’ve gone extreme.
There is a sticker on my car.
I’ve never done that because I think a politician should pay me to advertise for him or her, but with the choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate, his reckless and feckless response to the Wall Street crises, his disgusting propensity to attack the man rather than the issues, my car is now an ad.
Of course, I live in Texas so it’s not an especially effective ad, but still. I think it’s important for the world to know, that I, for my part, will be doing the right thing the day early voting begins.
One especially interesting thing is that the day I went to meet the other three Democrats in Williamson County to get my sticker, I was told that while they don’t expect Obama to take the county or even the state, they can’t believe how much interest they’re getting in the local Dems. Change starts at the bottom so that’s good news.
What really needs to change is the fact that somehow we’ve come to be a country wherein being a “regular guy or gal” is somehow considered a qualifying experience for high office. There is a straight line (and ever-shortening bar) from Bush to Palin, whose stardom in the Republican Party seems to stem from her calculated ordinariness.
All I need to know about the GOP is that they think she is the future. Personally, I prefer someone who is smarter, wiser, brighter, better educated, more honest, braver, more pragmatic, more curious and more skilled than the average joe sixpack or hockey mom. The GOP, however, would like to see the least qualified set up to lead.
It’s almost got me thinking about joining a political party. One step at a time, though. I don’t think I could handle officially becoming a Democrat and putting a sticker on my car in the same year.
I dragged myself away from (endlessly) hitting refresh on 538 long enough to enjoy last weekend’s ACL Fest. It was a good time. Our Galveston friends came in as usual, though they’d already been here most of the previous week due to Hurricane Ike, so in a way, ACL was kind of the last weekend of a good old fashioned hurricane party.
For once the weather was great. There was dust, though not like the lung-blackening filth permeating the air of 2005. It even got a bit chilly at night! The afternoon highs barely topped 90 making the whole thing so much easier than it has been in years when it gets to 108 and lingers in the upper 90s after dark. Here’s to the festival running a few weeks later in the month.
Offsetting the perfection of the weather was a lineup that was a little less exciting than previous years’.
On Friday we saw The Freddy Jones Band, M. Ward – both at the WaMu tent, though I guess by the time we showed up it had become the JP Morgan Tent if not in name than in fact. Hot Chip was next, an upbeat group that sounded like they’d grown up on New Order. That is high praise.
The highlight of the day, and for me the festival, was David Byrne. I grew up on the Talking Heads and they’re still one of my favorite bands, though I never got to see them except for a performance in 1991 when they played without Byrne – good, but not right. Byrne was amazing. He played some new material, but what really got the crowd excited were his trips back to Fear of Music and Remain in Light. Not just two of my favorite Heads albums, but two favorite albums. They played “Life During Wartime,” “The Great Curve,” “Houses in Motion,” “Once in a Lifetime,” “I Zimbra,” and my favorite, “Crosseyed and Painless.” I couldn’t have asked for a better show. With the sun setting at my back and the cool night settling over Zilker Park, I was in Heaven, amazed by how brilliantly those tunes, that style, hold up after all these years.
After Byrne, we caught Alejandro Escovedo’s set, which made me wonder why on earth I’ve never gone to one of his shows before. We ended with Manu Chao.
Saturday was good. Had I skipped it to watch UT paste Arkansas, though, it wouldn’t have been a loss. For me. It still would have been a loss for Arkansas. We saw The Nachito Herrera All-Stars, who were quite fun. Then John Fogerty for the CCR love, the Black Keys and finally Robert Plant & Allison Krauss, a good set, though I had to be told which songs were the Led Zep ones.
Sunday we enjoyed Gillian Welch, the Silversun Pickups, a taste of Blues Traveler, a band I’ve tried to like many times, but never quite “got:” A little of The Raconteurs and finally Galactic, whose set started late, but was, as usual, very good. We left before the Foo Fighters. I’ve seen them before and as a friend remarked after that show, “Oh, well, whatever, never mind.”
All in all, a good year. It was too light on good jazz and jam bands, and there were no great revelations like Gotan Project, Husky Rescue, Black Angels or Calexico, all bands I had discovered in years past. Still fun, though, and the weather was mercifully cool.
Next year, it’s in October. How cool is that?
The birds are singing a bit more and thus calling to be found. This mockingbird on one of the neighborhood trails especially so. He let me get pretty close before he took off, leaving me with perhaps my best mocker photo.
On Sunday R and I went to Hornsby Bend. On the river trail, we got a good look (and lousy shot) of this Crested Caracara perched high above the Colorado. We could hear, but not see, Blue Jays screeching at him from the nearby trees.
On the drive out, we had to stop for this Western Diamondback Rattlesnake, taking its time crossing the road.
After 20 years in Texas, this is the very first rattlesnake I’ve actually seen (heard lots of them, though). Strangely enough, the previous weekend, my brother was telling me he had just seen his first ever rattlesnake.
Halfway across the road, it stopped and started rattling. Not wanting to run over it and thus deprive the caracara or one of the many hawks swooping around the area of a tasty meal, I eased the car around it, but not before taking a few pictures.
Hopefully, it will be another 20 years before I see another one.
On the way out, with hawks screeching overhead, I spotted this Scissor-tailed Flycatcher, one of my favorite birds. I took his picture, figuring this might be the last one I would see until April.
Of course, I’ve seen quite a few on the way to work the past few days, but they’ll be heading south soon.
Despite George’s concern, this blog is not gone, to the birds or otherwise. The owner’s just livin’ more in the analog world lately.
I spent a fair amount of time this summer hiking and birding and reacquainting myself with the various trails and walks around Austin. A favorite of mine was Balcones Canyonlands National Wildlife Refuge, where my dad and I spent a morning exploring and not seeing the Golden-cheeked Warbler or Black-capped Vireo, the birds for whom the NWR exists. It was late in the season, though, and we did get some nice walks.
And, now, school starts up again, and perhaps more regular blogging. And not just about birds either, although this post may go to the birds, specifically these Black-necked Stilts that shot me the stink eye for making them get up off the road at Hornsby Bend last week.
